– China
was behind the online attack of Google, according to leaked
diplomatic cables. The electronic intrusion was “part of a coordinated
campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives,
private security experts and internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese
government.”

– In a
leaked diplomatic memo, dated two weeks after elections that landed
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in office, a senior American
diplomat said that during a meeting a few days before “Netanyahu
expressed support for the concept of land swaps, and
emphasized that he did not want to govern the West Bank and Gaza but
rather to stop attacks from being launched from there.”

– A storage
facility housing Yemen’s radioactive material was unsecured for up to a
week after its lone guard was removed and its surveillance camera was
broken, a secret U.S. State Department cable released by WikiLeaks
revealed Monday. “Very
little now stands between the bad guys and Yemen’s nuclear material,”
a Yemeni official said on January 9 in the cable.

– WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange told Al Jazeera network that some of the
unpublished cables show “Top
officials in several Arab countries have close links with the CIA,
and many officials keep visiting US embassies in their respective
countries voluntarily to establish links with this key US intelligence
agency. These officials are spies for the U.S. in their countries.”

– China
has been reselling Venezuela’s cheap oil at a profit,
according to a classified U.S. document released by WikiLeaks.
President Hugo Chavez was upset that China apparently profited by
selling fuel to other countries, fuel that it had sold China at a
discount in order to gain favor. The cable also describes falling crude
output in Venezuela caused by a host of problems within the national
oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA.

In 2010,
WikiLeaks released only about 2,000 of the approximate 250,000 cables
it claims to possess, and the pace of those releases dropped
dramatically as the holidays approached. If Assange’s promises are to
be believed, 2011 will be another important year for learning about the
hidden forces that drive our world.

BAE
The DIA has selected a pool of 11 companies to be its exclusive information technology subcontractors

U.S. Army’s underground GPS
The U.S. military is developing S Bug, an underground guidance system based on magnetic fields. Tunnels and caves are the new frontier for the US Army. While the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on the development of an underground “satnav” system (IOL 616) to guide soldiers underground, It is impossible to receive a GPS signal underground, which is why the Strategic Technology office of the Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) is working on the development of an alternative system that will work underground.

Pindr0p traces telephone calls
Telephone calls via internet can now be localised, thanks to their digital finger-print. Presented at a computer security conference in Chicago on October 5 by researchers from Georgia Tech, Pindr0p software makes it possible to identify the origin of a telephone call by analysing the artifacts and background noise associated with its transmission.

More than a dozen candidates are lining up to head the expanded and more autonomous Joint Situation Centre (SitCen), the intelligence agency of the EU’s new European External Action Service (EEAS) which officially comes into being on January 1.

MI6 has received a list of British militant Islamists who have studied in Islamic institutions in Syria.

On November 11, Elcomsoft published in Moscow the latest version of its flagship product, Internet Password Breaker, which enables the retrieval of password backups in an internet navigator.

DIY mobile phone tapping
At the DefCon hackers’ convention in Las Vegas on July 31, security consultant Chris Paget demonstrated how to record mobile telephone conversations with equipment costing a mere $1,500, a tenth of the price of an “IMSI catcher” tapping device.

Private investigators for public agency
While waiting to be incorporated into the future Economic Crime Agency, which will gather

Diligence’s elite commando
Nick Day, Russ Corn and Trefor Williams, Diligence’s three heads, all served together in the Special Boat Service (SBS) the special forces unit of the Royal Navy.

Video Analysis: Minority Report Soon a Reality?
European researchers are working on software to identify “suspicious behaviour” in crowds. The advent of high definition surveillance cameras connected to computer servers has given a boost to video analysis, a technique aimed at automatically detecting suspicious events (fights, abnormal behaviour, abandoned parcels, etc)

The GCQ has farmed out part of its Modernisation Interception program to Lockheed Martin

Job Vacancy for “Ethical” Hacker at DHS
30/04/2009 – The advertisement quickly did the rounds of forums specializing in hacking and computer security. Placed by General Dynamics, it offered the job of Senior Ethical Hacker in a computer security service at the Department of Homeland Security, the government agency that currently sees to the security of federal computer networks

DIA’s Favorite Sub-Contractors
10/04/2008 – Put out to tender last September (IOL 553), a USD 1 billion contract from the Defense Intelligence Agency for a Solutions for Intelligence Analysis program was awarded to a consortium consisting of the agency’s eight customary sub-contractors, including BAE.

Infiltrating the military with fake routers
A court in Texas sentenced the Saudi Arabian-born Ehab Ashoor to four years imprisonment May 6, for trying to sell counterfeit Cisco routers, manufactured in China, to the military base administered by the U

Hackers’ assault on software source codes
A report from the anti-virus manufacturer McAfee on the attack on Google, Adobe and other companies’ internal networks at the beginning of January has confirmed American intelligence agencies’ worst fears about the attack (IOL 610).

Satellites monitor Afghan poppyfields
In France anyone wanting to buy photographs taken byRapidEye satellite must go to an unlikely sounding source – the Societe de Services des Betteraviers, the service company to the beet-farming industry.

Armed Forces Want 4 Dimension Maps
The French armaments board Direction Generale pour l’Armement is putting the final touches to a program dubbed Geode4D that aims to provide the military with tools combining geographic information and climatic data starting from 2015.

How to Break Codes & Passwords on the Cheap
The hacker community is over the moon about an experiment that computer specialist David Campbell, founder of the security concern Electric Alchemy, is conducting on-line.

Agencies Want to Monitor Twitter & Facebook
In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital fund, has invested in Visible Technologies and Attensity, two firms that offer search engines specializing in social networks such as Twitter, Facebook Flickr, and You Tube

Vital Infrastructure, But Not Hacker-Proof
Arrested by the FBI on June 26, Jesse McGraw was accused of taking over control of the ventilation system of a hospital in Dallas.

Gordon M. Snow is the new man in charge of the FBI’s Cyber Division.

Endgame, virus-buster
An American company maintains a global data base of computers infected by viruses. The purpose is to filter them but also, eventually, to manipulate them.